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Adrian Hon: You've Been Played (2022, Basic Books) 4 stars

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it …

You've Been Played

4 stars

I appreciated Hon's willingness to avoid oversimplification in favor of accepting nuance throughout the book, which otherwise could have come across as an extended TED talk. I found the chapters on workplace and educational gamification particularly relevant and galling, and thought the exploration of ARGs as an insight into Qanon was fascinating.

One minor source of eye-rolling is Hon comes back a bit too often to his own small business as a counterexample for how gamification can be resisted or done well. His bona fides were established early in the book, so it could have gone a long way to have some more variety in the "Do" column.